This artist's illustration shows NASA's four successful Mars rovers (from left to right): Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, and Curiosity. The image also shows the upcoming Mars 2020 rover and a human explorer.

NASA Science missions circle Earth, the Sun, the Moon, Mars and many other destinations within our solar system, including spacecraft that look out even further into our universe. The Science Fleet depicts the scope of NASA's activity and how our missions have traveled throughout the solar system.

In this image, the second stage of the Black Brant IX sounding rocket separates from the ASPIRE payload. The third and final flight test of the ASPIRE payload was launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Sept. 7, 2018.

This high-definition image was taken on Sept. 7, 2018, during the third and final test flight of the ASPIRE payload. It was the fastest inflation of this size parachute in history and created a peak load of almost 70,000 pounds of force.

This artist concept shows the Mars Helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft, which will travel with NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission, currently scheduled to launch in July 2020, to demonstrate the viability and potential of heavier-than-air vehicles on the Red Planet.

The Mars Helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft, will travel with NASA's Mars 2020 rover, currently scheduled to launch in July 2020, to demonstrate the viability and potential of heavier-than-air vehicles on the Red Planet.

A slice of a meteorite scientists have determined came from Mars placed inside an oxygen plasma cleaner, which removes organics from the outside of surfaces. This slice will likely be used here on Earth for testing a laser instrument for NASA's Mars 2020 rover; a separate slice will go to Mars on the rover.

Close-up of a slice of a meteorite scientists have determined came from Mars. This slice will likely be used here on Earth for testing a laser instrument for NASA's Mars 2020 rover; a separate slice will go to Mars on the rover.

Rohit Bhartia of NASA's Mars 2020 mission holds a slice of a meteorite scientists have determined came from Mars. This slice will likely be used here on Earth for testing a laser instrument for NASA's Mars 2020 rover; a separate slice will go to Mars on the rover.

A 58-foot-tall Black Brant IX sounding rocket launches from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Oct. 4. This was the first test of the Mars 2020 mission's parachute-testing series, the Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment, or ASPIRE.

The left view is a sample view of a pile of rocks taken in the "Mars Yard" testing area at JPL. The right picture illustrates one way the camera data can be used to reveal the contours of a target from a distance.

The MOXIE investigation on NASA's Mars 2020 rover will extract oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. In this image, MOXIE Principal Investigator Michael Hecht, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, is in the MOXIE laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

This 2016 image comes from computer-assisted-design work on NASA's 2020 Mars rover. The design leverages many successful features of NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, but it adds new science instruments and a sampling system to carry out the new goals for the 2020 mission

NASA's Mars 2020 Project will re-use the basic engineering of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity to send a different rover to Mars, with new objectives and instruments. This view depicts the top of the 2020 rover's mast.

Figure 2. This figure demonstrates that the PIXL instrument detects important trace elements (red) at 10's ppm. Insert: Rb, Sr, Y, Zr are clearly detected due to the lack of interfering excitation lines at 13-17 keV in PIXL (continuum subtracted using a modeled fit to Bremsstrahlung).